I am of the opinion that these people did not buy a license. The seller advertised the sale of the movie. The customer believed they were buying the movie. Everybody involved with the transaction referred to it as purchasing the movie. The situation where you pay for a temporary license to view a movie is called a rental, and Amazon has that as a separate transaction type.
Says the guy that has radio as a distraction, or his wife, or his kids, or the hot chick jogging along side the road, or his rage at every other driver on the road for "not being as good of a driver as he is".
Of course it is considered as an unasked for gift. If it wasn't, the mail order scam of sending out unrequested product would never have gone away. The companies that forced the law into existence would have just switched to offering some low value product at cost and shipping some other product with ridiculous markup. Thus, completely skirting the law.
I'm sorry Mr. Smith, we mistakenly sent you the $99.99 WHITE cheddar cheese log by mistake instead of the $6.99 YELLOW cheddar cheese log. Please return it immediately. Oh, it was eaten at your Christmas party? Just give us your credit card number and we can charge the extra $93.00 to your card.
That leads to people jumping off at green lights so that they race as fast as they can and slam on the breaks at the next light, giving them time to type in the address while stopped at the red.
The "Safety" features in car computers are great examples of the law of unintended consequences. They generally make driving far more dangerous than if they just let people use the device.
To be fair, streaming is not buying music. It is renting it. If you were paying to rent per song, the price would be unreasonable, but $10 a month for temporary access to 100s of thousands of songs isn't really a 'suckers' product.
I don't know if I would go that far. U.C. Davis does genetic testing for pregnant women, and I got the joy of talking to one when my wife was pregnant. The 'Genetic Counselor' had no idea what the data meant. Every question I asked was met with a blank stare and the repeating of the line from the script she was given. It was awfully similar to calling an Indian tech support line.
It's too bad that someone, maybe like a co-worker, didn't listen to their concerns. Maybe if, instead of calling them "stupid anti-vaxers", they pointed out that the study linking vaccines to autism was only for a specific combination vaccine. If this hypothetical 'co-worker' pointed out that the doctor the person was placing their trust in actually recommended vaccination, just not the combined MMR. Perhaps the kids would have had to endure three shots instead of one, and would have never gotten measles.
The "Vax with anything'ers" are not just complacent, but actively encouraging the "Anti-Vaxers".
I have 9 different arm system in just this room with ARM processors with no lock on the bootloader. There are several more scattered around my home. The question isn't "Are there any systems where the boot loader is locked?". The question is whether or not you could buy them in the future, at the hypothetical time that ARM started replacing x86 as the desktop processor. Since you can easily buy unlocked ARM devices today, the answer to your question is, anyone who has a product on the market today. Besides, it is pretty simple to build a full computer from one of the huge number of raw ARM chips that are currently for sale.
The unlocked ARM devices in this room right now are:
2 x Raspberry Pi
2 x Nexus 4s
1 x Nexus One
1 x Ouya
2 x HTC G2s
1 x Nexus 7
Are you really trying to argue that a government felt the need to spell out that they had the right to form an army? And that the army had the right to be armed? Has there ever been any country in the history of the world where forming an armed military has ever been against that same countries laws? The very concept that the writers would feel the need to guarantee the government the ability to have an armed military is absurd.
Since the car owner didn't break into anything, it is clear that you completely understand that someone stealing $.05 from his would be ok with him. You clearly understand that breaking into his house would be a problem. Funny enough, it was the cop who did the breaking in, so you seem to have made a point that was exactly the opposite of what you intended.
There could be a death. In the same way that the personal computer died when the IBM compatibles killed the C64. The x86 lineage of computing could be supplanted by the ARM lineage just as the 6502 lineage was supplanted by the x86 lineage.
I will agree with your assessment of what makes a personal computer a personal computer, but there is some irony to having people belittle smartphones and tablets by calling them toys while implying that a traditional PC is a 'real' computer.
Ken Olsen destroyed a major corporation with that attitude.
That is the part many are missing. It isn't the "Computer" that matters. it is the HID. It is possible that the PC as we know it will survive as a niche. It is also possible that it will be so much cheaper to by quality HIDs for a tablet which would, combined with the ever increasing processing power of tablets, make the tablet everything that people want for a desktop.
There is no reason that the desktop of the future can't be an ARM based system that has the CPU/GPU/*PU in a tablet form factor that slides into a dock to give access to all of the desktop HID goodness that we enjoy today.
That is the kind of attitude that killed DEC. Believe it or not, it doesn't require a massive workstation to do most REAL work. Huge amounts of REAL work even gets done on phones and tablets. There may be a small subset of work that doesn't scale down to a laptop, but that will most definitely not be the majority of REAL work.
I used to agree entirely with your assesment. When people would ask if they should just get a laptop instead of a desktop, I would point out the benefits, but also warn them that laptops tend to burn themselves up in just a couple of years. I am starting to change my mind a bit though. The laptops currently in my home are 4, 3 and 1.5 years old. The only problems they have shown are that the rubber feet fell off (no surprise), and the hinges on the 4 and 1.5 year old laptops are getting a bit wonky. While the 4 year old laptop only gets used about 10 hours a week, the 1.5 year old laptop is used for gaming many hours a day.
This doesn't put them into the "They are just as durable as desktops" category yet, but compared to my previous experience with laptops, it is a marked improvement. I suspect that if your average person could get a laptop to last 5 years, they would be totally satisfied with the durability. After all, a decent non-gaming laptop can be had for $500 or less. The days of needing to spend > $2000 for a good laptop are long gone.
Actually, that is a reasonably good suggestion. Both AMD and nVidia drivers support rotating the screen. LCD monitors should not have any problem running on their sides. Vesa mounting holes are arranged in a square. So the only thing that is needed is a Vesa compatible stand. Mount the monitor sideways and you have a tall monitor.
You are right about only full screen windows, but Android does have Alt+Tab functionality. That is what the icon that looks like two boxes sitting one on top of the other is. When using a keyboard, that functionality maps to a button. I assume it is the functionality you would want, and which button it maps to is irrelevant. All of the Android browsers have tabs, and I would be surprised if there were not several terminal apps with tabs. Android could make a usable desktop today. I'm not going to claim it would be as good as Windows 7 or OSX, but it would be usable.
There are already a lot of people who are better served by an iPad in a clamshell keyboard dock than they would be by a full laptop or a tablet alone.
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I am of the opinion that these people did not buy a license. The seller advertised the sale of the movie. The customer believed they were buying the movie. Everybody involved with the transaction referred to it as purchasing the movie. The situation where you pay for a temporary license to view a movie is called a rental, and Amazon has that as a separate transaction type.
Or, it would just boost sales of equipment for detecting radiation.
Says the guy that has radio as a distraction, or his wife, or his kids, or the hot chick jogging along side the road, or his rage at every other driver on the road for "not being as good of a driver as he is".
Of course it is considered as an unasked for gift. If it wasn't, the mail order scam of sending out unrequested product would never have gone away. The companies that forced the law into existence would have just switched to offering some low value product at cost and shipping some other product with ridiculous markup. Thus, completely skirting the law.
I'm sorry Mr. Smith, we mistakenly sent you the $99.99 WHITE cheddar cheese log by mistake instead of the $6.99 YELLOW cheddar cheese log. Please return it immediately. Oh, it was eaten at your Christmas party? Just give us your credit card number and we can charge the extra $93.00 to your card.
That's why it is sad that ReplayTV got sued out of business. They did automatic commercial skip.
That leads to people jumping off at green lights so that they race as fast as they can and slam on the breaks at the next light, giving them time to type in the address while stopped at the red.
The "Safety" features in car computers are great examples of the law of unintended consequences. They generally make driving far more dangerous than if they just let people use the device.
That depends. Do we get to start with a perfectly spherical truck?
That must really get under the Finn's skin.
That was my first thought. The climate of Middle earth can be anything because... MAGIC!
And here folks is exactly the kind of person I was talking about.
To be fair, streaming is not buying music. It is renting it. If you were paying to rent per song, the price would be unreasonable, but $10 a month for temporary access to 100s of thousands of songs isn't really a 'suckers' product.
I don't know if I would go that far. U.C. Davis does genetic testing for pregnant women, and I got the joy of talking to one when my wife was pregnant. The 'Genetic Counselor' had no idea what the data meant. Every question I asked was met with a blank stare and the repeating of the line from the script she was given. It was awfully similar to calling an Indian tech support line.
It's too bad that someone, maybe like a co-worker, didn't listen to their concerns. Maybe if, instead of calling them "stupid anti-vaxers", they pointed out that the study linking vaccines to autism was only for a specific combination vaccine. If this hypothetical 'co-worker' pointed out that the doctor the person was placing their trust in actually recommended vaccination, just not the combined MMR. Perhaps the kids would have had to endure three shots instead of one, and would have never gotten measles.
The "Vax with anything'ers" are not just complacent, but actively encouraging the "Anti-Vaxers".
That's why instead of poisoning the food, you put huge amounts of wasabi and hot sauce in it.
I have 9 different arm system in just this room with ARM processors with no lock on the bootloader. There are several more scattered around my home. The question isn't "Are there any systems where the boot loader is locked?". The question is whether or not you could buy them in the future, at the hypothetical time that ARM started replacing x86 as the desktop processor. Since you can easily buy unlocked ARM devices today, the answer to your question is, anyone who has a product on the market today. Besides, it is pretty simple to build a full computer from one of the huge number of raw ARM chips that are currently for sale.
The unlocked ARM devices in this room right now are:
2 x Raspberry Pi 2 x Nexus 4s 1 x Nexus One 1 x Ouya 2 x HTC G2s 1 x Nexus 7
Are you really trying to argue that a government felt the need to spell out that they had the right to form an army? And that the army had the right to be armed? Has there ever been any country in the history of the world where forming an armed military has ever been against that same countries laws? The very concept that the writers would feel the need to guarantee the government the ability to have an armed military is absurd.
Any cryptographic lock down that may have existed in some previous ARM processors is irrelevant to my point.
Since the car owner didn't break into anything, it is clear that you completely understand that someone stealing $.05 from his would be ok with him. You clearly understand that breaking into his house would be a problem. Funny enough, it was the cop who did the breaking in, so you seem to have made a point that was exactly the opposite of what you intended.
There could be a death. In the same way that the personal computer died when the IBM compatibles killed the C64. The x86 lineage of computing could be supplanted by the ARM lineage just as the 6502 lineage was supplanted by the x86 lineage.
I will agree with your assessment of what makes a personal computer a personal computer, but there is some irony to having people belittle smartphones and tablets by calling them toys while implying that a traditional PC is a 'real' computer.
Ken Olsen destroyed a major corporation with that attitude.
That is the part many are missing. It isn't the "Computer" that matters. it is the HID. It is possible that the PC as we know it will survive as a niche. It is also possible that it will be so much cheaper to by quality HIDs for a tablet which would, combined with the ever increasing processing power of tablets, make the tablet everything that people want for a desktop.
There is no reason that the desktop of the future can't be an ARM based system that has the CPU/GPU/*PU in a tablet form factor that slides into a dock to give access to all of the desktop HID goodness that we enjoy today.
That is the kind of attitude that killed DEC. Believe it or not, it doesn't require a massive workstation to do most REAL work. Huge amounts of REAL work even gets done on phones and tablets. There may be a small subset of work that doesn't scale down to a laptop, but that will most definitely not be the majority of REAL work.
I used to agree entirely with your assesment. When people would ask if they should just get a laptop instead of a desktop, I would point out the benefits, but also warn them that laptops tend to burn themselves up in just a couple of years. I am starting to change my mind a bit though. The laptops currently in my home are 4, 3 and 1.5 years old. The only problems they have shown are that the rubber feet fell off (no surprise), and the hinges on the 4 and 1.5 year old laptops are getting a bit wonky. While the 4 year old laptop only gets used about 10 hours a week, the 1.5 year old laptop is used for gaming many hours a day.
This doesn't put them into the "They are just as durable as desktops" category yet, but compared to my previous experience with laptops, it is a marked improvement. I suspect that if your average person could get a laptop to last 5 years, they would be totally satisfied with the durability. After all, a decent non-gaming laptop can be had for $500 or less. The days of needing to spend > $2000 for a good laptop are long gone.
Actually, that is a reasonably good suggestion. Both AMD and nVidia drivers support rotating the screen. LCD monitors should not have any problem running on their sides. Vesa mounting holes are arranged in a square. So the only thing that is needed is a Vesa compatible stand. Mount the monitor sideways and you have a tall monitor.
You are right about only full screen windows, but Android does have Alt+Tab functionality. That is what the icon that looks like two boxes sitting one on top of the other is. When using a keyboard, that functionality maps to a button. I assume it is the functionality you would want, and which button it maps to is irrelevant. All of the Android browsers have tabs, and I would be surprised if there were not several terminal apps with tabs. Android could make a usable desktop today. I'm not going to claim it would be as good as Windows 7 or OSX, but it would be usable.
There are already a lot of people who are better served by an iPad in a clamshell keyboard dock than they would be by a full laptop or a tablet alone.